Quentin & Cecilia (backdated slightly)

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Quentin gets an unwanted glimpse into Cecilia's head after her return from Honduras.

The library was quiet at this hour. So was the medlab. Most of the mansion, really. The eerie calm of a country estate, made eerier by the general lack of silence at Xavier's.

Cecilia hated it.

Normally, she'd have been asleep by now. But there hadn't been much sleep lately - not restful sleep, anyway. Not since coming back from Honduras. Not since, abruptly, without warning, Raúl's face would pop up in her dreams, turning them into nightmares.

It happened during the day too. The sudden intrusion of a memory she wanted desperately to forget. Pardon the interruption. We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you a rerun of a show you never wanted to watch.

She'd ended up in the kitchen, the kinetic hub of a mansion like this, hoping she'd find some residual energy or task of some kind to distract her. But at the moment, she sat at the table, staring blankly at a magazine, thinking about her body, strong, triumphant, standing over his, bloodied and disfigured.

A frame frozen in her head, horrifying, with no hope of being unstuck.

It was a movie that was playing in more than one theater, so to speak. Quentin had never been particularly receptive as a telepath, but he was learning, and his education was simplified by people who could not keep their own brains to themselves.

Unable to find sleep himself because of the foreign bloody memories invading his mind, he hastily donned a pair of short running shorts and a t-shirt, and trotted downstairs to the apparent source of the psychic disturbance.

Hmm, the doctor who wasn't Jean or that intrusively nosy one-armed bimbo. Hadn't she been away for a while, like out of the country? Quentin vaguely recalled hearing that. She was looking rough, too. Still, no excuse for broadcasting her nightmares. He'd had enough of that already from other people.

"Yo, can you keep it quiet up there?" he asked as he entered the kitchen.

Cecilia almost jumped out of her chair at the sound of his voice. "What?" She turned to look at him, pushing the magazine onto the floor as she whipped around. She stared at for a second, exhaling before she bent down to pick it up. "Sorry," she looked over at him again. "What?"

Quentin tapped his forehead. "Quiet. Up here. You're so loud, I can't sleep."

"Oh God." Cecilia winced. "Sorry. I can't help it, I swear. I've got loud thoughts. And I—" She paused, eyeing him warily. She was silent as she sized him up, her wince turning into a frown. "Quentin, right?" As if there was anybody else this telepath with the hair could be. "They haven't taught you how to stay out of people's heads, I take it?"

Quentin's eyes narrowed as he went to a cupboard to retrieve a large Costco-sized jar of peanut butter and then a spoon from a drawer. If he was going to be awake this time of night, then he deserved a treat. "That's next term's subject. And people like you don't make it easy for me."

"I know," she said, her eyes narrowing a bit too. "I didn't mean it in a blame-y way." She did a little, actually, but she was tired, so she was testy. "I just meant it's been a while since I lived with an early-stage telepath."

She grabbed a mug of tea she'd placed on the table and took a sip. It had gone cold. How long had she been sitting here? "'People like you,'" she echoed him, shaking her head with a wry smile. "Not the context I usually hear that in."

"I know people think a lot of shitty things about me and say I'm a bad person," Quentin sneered after swallowing a spoonful of peanut butter, "But come on. I don't say stupid shit like that. I deserve at least that much credit. 'People like you' like . . . traumatized superheroes or whatever the reason you had for beating someone to death. And I'm not judging," he added emphatically. "Felt like he deserved it."

She stared at him for a few seconds, her mouth agape with incredulity. "What," she said slowly, "are you even thinking?" Without realizing it, she'd clenched her jaw. "I didn't... I didn't invite you into my head, Quentin. I didn't share those thoughts with you. You saw these — this thing, this horrifying, horrifying thing. But it wasn't meant for you. Why in the world..." She turned to face him more completely, the full brunt of her attention on him. "Nobody deserved that, Quentin. Nobody."

"I told you, I can't help it," he repeated pointedly. "The risk you take by staying in a 'mutant haven' with learning psis. And trust me, there are some people who do deserve that. Like that Sabretooth fucker, or whatever shit name he calls himself," he muttered, an involuntary shiver running down his back. "Mutants taking advantage of and killing other mutants. Like we don't already have enough problems with humans."

"Don't say that." Cecilia shook her head. "It's — to take a human life, or to come close, is something that just..." She looked down at the mug in her hand, quiet for a bit while he ran his spoon through the peanut butter jar.

"I know," he quietly admitted, recalling how close he had come to the same end the previous spring. "Whatever. Sorry, I guess." The room was quiet while he took another couple of spoonfuls. "Who was it, anyway? The guy."

"You tell me," Cecilia said dryly. She sighed, placing the mug on the table and standing. "How old are you? 17? 18?" She moved to the fridge, eyeing the peanut butter as she passed him. "I know you heard my thoughts, or saw them or whatever. Doesn't mean we need to talk about them. Pretty inappropriate."

Quentin shrugged noncommittally. "All I got was your actual memory, not any of the actual details, so no, I don't know unless I actually try to read your thoughts — which I wouldn't do because it's pointless — or you tell me. Chuckles is all about talking about what's up. Supposed to help." He shrugged again, and noticing her glance at his snack, offered her the jar.

"Charles has a Ph.D, and he only really needs the talking as a formality." Cecilia opened the freezer. She pushed aside a few things, then pulled out a container of ice cream that she figured nobody wouldn't miss. "You," she turned around, "are a teenager with — I'm guessing — a rebellious streak and some pretty excellent hair, who I'm really only speaking to for the first time tonight." She stood at the counter near him. "Hand me a spoon."

"I'd like to think it's more than just a streak." The silverware drawer opened of its own accord, and the requested spoon gently hovered over to her. A masterful display of sensitive telekinesis, in stark contrast to the unruly telepathy, Quentin thought wryly.

Cecilia snorted, but she couldn't help a small smile as she reached out and took the offered spoon. "I'm sure," she said, not even bothering to hide her skepticism. She ripped the lid off the container, staring down at a pint of mint chocolate chip. Then, she dug her spoon into it. "I'm not — I haven't really talked to anyone about this," she told him. "It's really private. And if I didn't feel like I had to explain myself, I wouldn't be saying anything to you." The implications were beyond clear.

"Well, you don't have to worry about me telling anyone. I only ever talk to, like, three people, anyway, and I'm not even using my mouth for talking half the time with one of them," he offered, as if that were appropriate comfort to a stranger baring her soul.

"Mm." Cecilia didn't bother to hide her amusement. "I'm not even touching that. No, sir." She shook her head, grinning, before bringing a spoonful of ice cream to her lips. "Use protection," she admonished him. "Nobody here's clean, no matter what they say." She raised an eyebrow, studying him. "I can prescribe you PrEP, you know."

"And make me a slave to profits-before-people Big Pharma?" The hint of a smirk made it unclear whether or not Quentin was trolling with that comment. "Whatever. Go ahead, 'explain.'"

Cecilia smiled a bit wider at what she assumed was his joke, but it faded as she looked down at the ice cream carton, where her spoon was excavating green ice cream trails around chocolate chunks. "He was — well, is, I guess, a drug lieutenant. Or something like that." The man's face almost flashed before her. She thought she could feel his skin, cold, clammy, stretching around her, wrapping her up while she writhed about. Her shield flickered into sight for a moment, then disappeared, which only made the pit in her stomach grow. "In Honduras," she added.

Her mind, already a pit of disgust and self-questioning, was sinking into a quagmire of loathing that, had Quentin not begun to assemble the meager shields he was learning from Jean and Xavier, threatened to pull him in. He was all too familiar with that emotion as it was.

"What were you doing in Honduras?"

Cecilia studied him for a second. She liberated a heaping scoop of ice cream, silently chiding herself to hold it together. "I used to work there. With Doctors without Borders. And I set up a health clinic last year through some non-profits. One that treated mutants, until it was burned down." She stuck the spoon in her mouth.

Maybe it was a credit to the time he had spent here, or maybe it was just late at night and he was too exhausted to be as contentious as usual, but Quentin's first response was not something about the predictability of flatscans attacking and destroying mutant resource centers. Instead, he just looked sad. "Sorry. Did anyone get hurt?"

"Well," Cecilia said flatly, "aside from a few members of the mutant drug gang who burned it down, and the man I — well, no." She shrugged. "Not in the short term. Guess I should be grateful. But it also means we've got plenty of people who weren't, aren't and probably can't get good care down there." She cast her eyes down toward the counter. "So."

"A mutant gang destroyed a mutant health clinic?" Quentin asked, the sadness in his expression easily morphing into revulsion. "I know you've got this whole 'And harm ye none' whatever going, Doc, but come on. You think people like that don't deserve an eye for an eye?"

"No," Cecilia said sharply, her eyes flicking back up to him. "I don't. At all." She set the spoon on the counter. "Have you ever watched someone die, Quentin? Because I have," she said this as a matter of fact, not feeling. Her voice wasn't rising, but her words took on a kind of intensity. "More often than I'd care for. And half the time, it happens seconds or minutes or hours or days or weeks after I've cut open their body and put my hands in it, doing everything I can to keep them alive. Everything. You have no idea how—" Something in her throat caught, and so she just shook her head.

"Then what do you think you should do?" Quentin shot back, meeting her gaze. "You might — might! — have an argument against flatscans because they're defenseless. But mutants who turn on their own people because, what, they weren't paying protection money? We have a responsibility to our community, to get rid of this, this cancer inside us that would kill us before the flatscans decide to do the job themselves. You're a doctor. You treat cancer with poison, radiation, and precision surgery, not by asking it nicely to stop being malignant."

"These are people too, Quentin." Cecilia had returned to the calmer, quieter voice of reason. "And they were taken care of. The X-Men saw to that." She had too, in her own way, but she'd been reluctant, and if she hadn't been forced to defend herself, she might not have. But that wasn't any of his business.

"Your bleeding heart must make such a mess on your shoes." Quentin leaned over and looked down, and then offered Cecilia a look of mild disappointment. "Although maybe that wouldn't even be a downgrade for you."

"Watch yourself, kid." Cecilia admonished, giving him a look. She stared at him for a second, her mind drifting to a moment from her ortho rotation, where she reset a patient's dislocated shoulder on her own. She raised an eyebrow at him after the bone snapped, then grabbed another scoop of ice cream.

Quentin's eyes widened in shock for a moment when he registered the foreign memory, and then quickly narrowed them. "That was not fucking necessary. And my question still stands. What're you going to do? You set up a place to help people — mutants — get medical help they'd otherwise never get. That place gets destroyed by a mutant drug cartel that, I assume like every other drug cartel, is the end result of American imperialist intervention. So you obviously can't go to the authorities for help because they're the ones who put this all together in the first place. It's left to you yourself to do something or not."

"Well," Cecilia said quietly and carefully, "I did something." It wasn't an admission of guilt, exactly. If anything, she sounded resigned to it. "So."

"So stop hating yourself for it. Direct that hatred to the people who deserve it." Quentin got up to wash his spoon in the sink and then returned it and the jar of peanut butter back to where they belonged. "Cheers, Doc. Glad we had this talk."

"Yeah. Me too." Cecilia said as dryly as humanly possible, watching him as he adjusted items in the cabinet. "Highlight of my day."